This site is the blogging component for my main site Crank Astronomy (formerly "Dealing with Creationism in Astronomy"). It will provide a more interactive component for discussion of the main site content. I will also use this blog to comment on work in progress for the main site, news events, and other pseudoscience-related issues.

If, as EU supporters like to claim, plasmas are so intractable mathematically that no one can compute any model with any accuracy, why are commercial-grade software for modeling plasma systems on the market? The fact that such systems exist at all is evidence that plasmas behave under the influence of natural laws and are not mystical, incomprehensible things.

There is plenty of published evidence of this fact.

Even More Research on Plasma Simulation Development

Consider this published dissertation: Studies of Electrical Plasma Discharges. Note that Fig 1.10 of this work is generated by a plasma model, and is equivalent to the graphic in James Cobine's "Gaseous Conductors" from the 1940s (pg 213, Figure 8.4) which EU supporters always like to reference.

Here are just SOME of the articles on plasma simulation codes I found with a quick search at the Cornell Preprint Server:

Consider The Plasma Theory and Simulation Group at UC Berkeley. If you scroll down the page, the group lists some of the projects, including commercial product development, where they have been involved. A little further down the page, they actually provide a number of their plasma simulation codes in source code form. Some of these codes were apparently used in designing a number of plasma devices so they have been tested against experiments. Since they are provided in source code form, they could probably be compiled for almost any platform! The EU supporters have NO excuses not to try these out for their favorite model of the Sun or galaxies. But I will not hold my breath for them to do any actual work.

PLASMAKIN: a chemical kinetics package. From the SourceForge page: “PLASMAKIN is a package to handle physical and chemical data used in plasma physics modeling and to compute gas-phase and gas-surface kinetics data: particle production and loss rates, photon emission spectra and energy exchange rates.”

VORPAL From the web page: “VORPAL enables researchers to simulate complex physical phenomena in less time and at a much lower cost than empirically testing process changes for plasma and vapor deposition processes. VORPAL offers a unique combination of physical models to cover the entire range of plasma simulation problems. Ionization and neutral gas models enable VORPAL to bridge the gap between plasma and neutral flow physics.”

PicUp 3D: This program models plasma interactions of satellites in the solar wind and other space environments. A popular claim of EU supporters is that satellites cannot detect a 'uniform' flow of electrons or ions powering an electric Sun. The problem with this notion is that the satellites are not uniform conductors so embedding in even a uniform plasma will generate voltages in the satellites structure and the electrons try to move into a configuration compatible with the plasma flow creating internal voltages which can sometimes kill the satellite.

But few of these codes are new. How were they developed?

As with most of these types of codes, initially by a small group of researchers, or perhaps even an individual researcher, who had a need for a plasma code and wrote it themselves from scratch. When the code was found to have reasonable agreement with the experiments the researcher(s) were doing, the code obtained wider distribution, and revisions by others. Eventually, if the code is found useful for a wide range of problems where there is an industrial, commercial, or security interest, the code might get support from a larger team of researchers and developers, but that doesn't happen until the code has proven its usefulness.

Excuses, excuses...

Why haven't any of these codes been found (and utilized) by the EU 'theorists'? There is sufficient documentation available that any interested party could run what currently exists, or write their own version in their programming language of choice. Why aren't the Electric Universe books full of results of detailed simulations from which we can derive numbers which we can compare to actual measurements by spacecraft?

Why do we see nothing from EU but pictures (often taken by others doing legitimate research) and 'stories' indistinguishable from mythology?

Coming soon, some of the odds-n-ends on plasma modeling to close out (at least for now) this topic.

7 comments:

axismundi
said...

How was that reply off-topic? I was responding to direct questions asked by Nereid in the thread. Now THIS is off-topic. At any rate, it is clear that you are not interested in debate of any sort, but are simply trying to gather fodder for your quixotic quest to link Biblical creationism to a new scientific paradigm. Future historians of science, if they take any note of your contributions at all, will undoubtedly delight in pointing out the staggering gall of a supporter of the Big Bang (an explicitly creationist paradigm) trying to smear a competing theory that has absolutely nothing to do with creationism, is in fact antithetical to it, as some kind of creationism.

It is exactly that mindset that raises the stakes of this intellectual debate to one of 'cultural war', every bit as compelling as the holding action waged by the geocentrists against the heliocentrists. Notice how I phrased that. And guess which camp you're in?

So your excuse is Nereid made you do it? I've rejected more of Nereid's posts than any other commenter in this blog (second only to spammers) for dragging threads off-topic. What are you? 15 years old? Grow up.

Don't want to be compared to creationists, then STOP ACTING LIKE CREATIONISTS.

1) Loading 'problems' in rapid-fire succession to overload the opponent. This is known as the Gish Gallop. Gish would even go so far as to *repeat* material that had been demonstrated wrong years previously, like a robot. This certainly fits EU supporters.2) If you actually followed this blog, you would know that most creationists oppose Big Bang cosmology (Setterfield, Gentry, and others). Many support the claims of Arp (discordant redshifts) and Tifft (quantized redshifts). How much does EU rely on the work of Arp & Tifft?3) Emphasis on false dichotomy, ignoring that fact that there many be many other models (not just theirs) that have yet to be tested.4) Describing the issue with science as a 'cultural war'.5) and more Electric Universe and Creationism, Science and Belief Systems

I'm happy to debate science when EU presents something that can actually pass as science. A model only succeeds based on actual predictions we can compare to MEASUREMENTS. That means a model that produces NUMBERS, not hand-waving and excuses (Mathematics: The Language of Science). Big Bang cosmology is currently accepted because it actually generates numbers that we can compare to real measurements.

You're either a newcomer to this blog who hasn't read all the material already written on these topics, or you've been around awhile and just decided to cut-n-paste from your EU bible. Here's some reading to get you up to speed...

You challenge astronomers about the behavior of a region only 50,000 km thick near the solar photosphere where we have limited measurements, while evading the failed predictions of EU models for the region from the photosphere to the heliopause where we have good measurements (covering about 150 BILLION km).

Argue that we can't 'know' what going on out there? Maybe you could check some actual SCIENCE.http://dealingwithcreationisminastronomy.blogspot.com/2009/01/astronomy-as-unprovable-science.htmlhttp://dealingwithcreationisminastronomy.blogspot.com/2009/08/cosmos-in-your-pocket-expanded-revised.htmlhttp://dealingwithcreationisminastronomy.blogspot.com/2009/09/scott-rebuttal-iii-importance-of.htmlhttp://dealingwithcreationisminastronomy.blogspot.com/2010/04/real-science-vs-cosmological-and.htmlhttp://dealingwithcreationisminastronomy.blogspot.com/2009/03/theory-vs-experiment-i.htmlhttp://dealingwithcreationisminastronomy.blogspot.com/2009/09/theory-vs-experiment-ii.htmlhttp://dealingwithcreationisminastronomy.blogspot.com/2009/11/what-astronomers-didnt-know.htmlhttp://dealingwithcreationisminastronomy.blogspot.com/2010/02/crank-science-worse-than-wrong.htmlhttp://dealingwithcreationisminastronomy.blogspot.com/2010/05/testing-science-at-leading-edge.htmlhttp://dealingwithcreationisminastronomy.blogspot.com/2010/06/testing-science-at-leading-edge-ii.html

Correction: The distance from the photosphere to the heliopause is about 15 BILLION km, not 150 BILLION km as noted above. I relied on my memory on the chromosphere & corona, but checking a reference, I find the region is above 1 million K out to 3 solar radii. Still bad for EU if you consider the volume of a sphere 15 BILLION km in radius to the volume of the 2 solar radii shell of the chromosphere & low corona. EUs problem covers a much larger volume of space, made more embarrassing by the number of spacecraft we have taking measurements in the region.

If Axismundi knew what they were talking about, they would know that it is not a 'blackbody' temperature, but more akin to a 'brightness' temperature, which has a very different meaning.

A answer to to you, Tom Bridgman, about how you compared "Dark Matter", "Electric Plasma Currents"...

That we don't have radio-telescope good enough to observe potential low voltage currents in space. Even if intergalactic and interstellar currents exists. Invicible plasma currents are not mystical. They exist between the sun and the earth, between saturn and Io and have been proven to exist in laboratories.A nother thing is that the EU theory isn't based on plasma currentes trough space, but a comparison between lab tested plasma formations and observed space phenomenon, which led to the conclusion that interpgalactic and interstellar currents should exist. It is not ad hoc to asume that electric currents exist, neither would it make sence if most of the currents between stars and galaxies would have been vicible to the naked eye.Dark Matter, in the other hand, is from start pure invention. There are no predictions for dark matter, it is not even based on anything known to exist. It is just supose to have similar properties as gravity, though it apears to create filnamentary structures between galaxies and between stars. Dark matter is unquestionably pseudoscience.You could claim that EU is pseudoscience, but not on the base that the theory postulates electric currents, which are invicible to use (at least for now).Thanks :D

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About Me

I obtained my doctorate in physics and astronomy in 1994. I currently work in scientific data visualization for the media and public outreach. For more information on how I became involved in the creationism issue, visit my main page